As Marie Stopes International has programmes in 43 different countries, I inevitably spend a lot of my time travelling – volcanic ash dependent of course. I am inspired when I visit the different teams and experience the variety of environments that we work in. But I am always struck by the challenges that are faced when it comes to actually getting to the women and men that need our services.
More and more we are seeing that people living in large towns or cities are able to access healthcare in one form or another, but those that live in small villages, urban slums and rural communities struggle to find quality health services. In fact, access to family planning and sexual and reproductive healthcare can be hampered by a number of factors such as: they may live in remote places; oftentimes they don’t have enough money; war and conflict means that people have to leave their homes, sometimes in very large numbers; and ignorance can kill, we need to make sure that young people have access to information that could save their life.
With all of these challenges, I am consistently impressed to see the new ways that the Marie Stopes International teams find to overcome them. I have seen people climb on to the back of a camel in Mongolia, paddle a canoe in Bangladesh and walk up hazardous mountain paths in Nepal to make sure they reach the unreached, serve the underserved and provide them with much needed family planning and sexual and reproductive health services.
I am proud of the Marie Stopes International team’s bravery, courage and tireless efforts to do the hard things, to deliver family planning in places that others won’t go. The commitment of these teams help me when I get back to my office in London and am confronted with figures like the 215 million women that want family planning but don’t have access to it – that is a staggering number; in fact it is more than the entire population of Brazil. I know that by working together we can bring that number down, and that is what keeps me coming to work every day.
To find out how Marie Stopes International is working toward Millennium Development Goal 5: reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015, visit
www.fivebyfifteen.org.